by John French
She glanced at the Navigator, but he had gone back to stirring the broth suspiciously. She had woken to find Nilus curled up in the corner of the cell. It wasn’t a proper brig, just a small storage space by the look of it. The crew of the freighter had ripped out the inner locking mechanism, and sealed them in with a bowl of broth, and a plastek jug of water that tasted like metal and dust. She had slept in spite of herself, exhaustion overriding fear and uncertainty. Mercifully, she had not dreamed. This had been the first time she and Nilus had spoken to each other since they had reached the Antius. Given the breathless scramble to escape the prison ship, it was also, she realised, the first time they had ever really talked at all.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You can keep your secrets. I am sure you have more than a few.’ He paused, then glanced up at her, eyes sharp and wary. ‘You were the remembrancer, weren’t you?’
Mersadie stiffened, cautious.
‘I was a remembrancer,’ she replied after a moment, then folded her legs to sit on the floor. ‘There were a lot of us.’
‘But I recognised your name. You were well known, a bit famous even, yes? You and… What was her name? The imagist.’
‘Keeler,’ she said, the name heavy in her mouth. ‘Euphrati Keeler.’
‘That was it. You were both quite the thing, weren’t you?’
‘That was our job,’ she said, and shrugged. ‘To see the Great Crusade for people who would never be able to see it.’
He smiled, the expression a crooked twist to his mouth.
‘But, I remember the talk – you got close to the heart of things. Very close. Practically a step away from the Warmaster.’
She blinked, and…
…a door slamming open, followed by heavy metal-on-metal footsteps. Mersadie knew it was a Space Marine even before the impossibly huge shadow fell over her. She turned to see a shadowy form behind her, robed in a cream tunic edged with sea-green trim. The Warmaster’s equerry, Maloghurst, was known as ‘the Twisted’, as much for his labyrinthine mind as the horrible injuries that had broken his body and left him grotesquely malformed.
‘Loken,’ he said, ‘these are civilians.’
‘I can vouch for them,’ said Loken.
Maloghurst turned his eyes to her…
She shivered. Nilus was watching her, the oily black of his whiteless eyes glittering above his crooked smile.
‘Why were you in the Nameless Fortress?’ she asked him.
‘Was that what they called it?’ He snorted. ‘How very predictable the methods of oppression become.’ He shook his head and took another spoon of broth. ‘Where was it?’
‘Titan, I think,’ she replied.
‘But here we are somewhere off Uranus, hoping somehow that this bucket of rust doesn’t catch a shell in one of the biggest void engagements in history.’
‘They were taking us somewhere,’ said Mersadie. ‘For whatever reason, they decided to move us. When the invasion started they must have decided–’
‘To kill us all rather than let such a dangerous set of prisoners fall back into the hands of the enemy.’ He laughed. ‘They thought very highly of us all.’
He shook his head and stabbed his spoon at the surface of the grey broth.
‘Why were you a prisoner, Nilus?’ asked Mersadie again, after a moment.
‘Why were any of us? Why are we alive, here and now? Wrong place, wrong time.’ He laughed again, the sound hollow and high. ‘You actually want to know?’
She nodded.
‘I was a Navigator on board a warship,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘Not even the prime Navigator, but that ship was called the Akontia, and it was–’
‘Part of the Sixty-Third Expeditionary Fleet,’ she finished.
He nodded.
‘Indeed. One of the Imperial Army vessels honoured by the Warmaster to accompany him to war… An honour that does not bring kindness to its crew or Navigators when they fall into the hands of the Emperor’s loyal servants.’ He spoke the last words through bared teeth.
‘You… The ship fled to the Solar System?’
‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘The officers mutinied after Isstvan. Half of the military commanders and units on board were diehard Horus loyalists. But the captain and the other half wanted nothing to do with it. They came to us, to the Navigators, saying that they needed our help to get out… and we agreed. My house does not like this war, not any part of it or any side of it. So, when we can remove ourselves from it, we do.’
He paused and shivered. Mersadie found herself wondering what could make a creature that looked out on the immaterium afraid.
‘The next time we translated into the warp we took the ship off course,’ said Nilus eventually. The diehards were supposed to be dealt with then, but… they lived up to that title. It became a battleground inside the ship. Storms came, and… something else, too. By that point we were lost on the tides, rolled by the storm. So, we… I… dumped us back out into reality. And here we were, within touching distance of the light that shines on Terra. They, the ones that found us, killed the rest of the crew I think. Clean sweep, fire and screams…’
‘But they kept you alive,’ said Mersadie.
‘Yes,’ he said, looking at her with his midnight eyes. ‘Don’t ask me why.’ The side of his mouth twitched up in a smile. The expression somehow made her feel colder.
‘And you, Mersadie Oliton, remembrancer and friend to the Sons of Horus, what happened to you, and why do you think you need to speak to the Praetorian of Terra?’
She shivered. Behind her eyes she saw a wolf rising from black water under a sickle moon.
‘I–’ she began.
‘You said to the masters of this ship that you needed to reach Terra. Forgive me if I am curious as to why you want to speak to Rogal–’
Nilus broke off and his head twitched around, his gaze flicking between the corners of the room. The broth tumbled to the floor as he came to his feet.
‘Something is happening,’ he said, breathing hard. ‘Something is–’
And the lights blinked out as the world began to shake.
Vek opened his eyes. Light and sound filled the bridge. Explosions lit in the view beyond the viewports. Pieces of metal blasted outwards from the first ship struck and caught another ship’s engine cowlings as it passed close by. They tore like parchment in a shotcannon blast. The ship began to skid across the void. The Antius rocked. Cracks pinged across the viewports as a wave of micro-debris broke over them.
‘Damage!’ someone was shouting.
‘Where?’ Vek shouted back.
‘I… I don’t know. Port…’
‘Find out.’
Vek began to push himself up. The deck pitched and he slammed back down onto the metal. He could taste blood in his mouth. A thin hand with a grip like a machine closed on his arm and hoisted him up. He looked up at Aksinya.
‘Sir, you need to come with me.’
‘What is happening?’ Koln shouted as she pulled herself up the stairs onto the helm platform. The brevet captain was pale, eyes wide, bordering on panic.
‘I…’ stammered the watch officer. Beyond the viewports, the ship with the shredded engines hit a smaller ship prow-on. A new blaze of light blanked the night.
‘Full astern!’ shouted Koln. ‘Thirty degrees down angle! Do it now.’
The Antius began to judder as its engines and thrusters pushed it back and down, away from the expanding cloud of destruction.
Vek shook his head. His thoughts were racing, putting together the pieces that he hadn’t seen at first. ‘They fired on us, didn’t they? Those shells were meant for us.’
‘They missed,’ said Aksinya, trying to pull him away. ‘But the warship that fired is still out there, and the odds are low that it will make the same mistake twice.’
‘T
he prisoner…’ he said. ‘They checked that the prisoner was still alive before they fired…’
He shook himself free of Aksinya’s grasp.
‘Get the children to a shuttle,’ he said. ‘Be ready to launch if we get hit.’
‘Sir, you need to–’
‘I am going to speak to her, now. If we are going to be killed by our own side I want to know why.’
Mersadie was banging on the cell door again. There was blood on her knuckles.
‘Listen to me!’ she shouted. ‘You need to listen to me!’
She roared; a pit of anger was opening in her now. She had accepted her fate long ago. She saw the consequences of her years spent with the XVI Legion and could not fault the judgement of the Imperium. It was the price for the truth of what had happened to Horus, what had happened to everything. Except now there was something more important, just as there had been all those years ago when she and the other survivors of the Eisenstein had brought Dorn the news of the Warmaster’s treachery. It felt so much the same. But this time, she was the only messenger.
‘That’s a blast wave vibration,’ said Nilus. He was crouched in the corner of the room, legs drawn up. His head was raised, eyes darting around the walls as sounds clanged from spot to spot. He was breathing hard, sweating. ‘Ships like this have no shields. If someone tries to shoot a hole in it, we are not going to last long.’
Mersadie raised her hand to strike the door again.
The locks disengaged with a clang, and the door swung outwards. The rotund man with the polished skin and opal-dotted forehead stood in the space beyond. A guard stood with him, hands twitching on a lasgun.
‘What have you brought down on us?’ said the man. There was fear in his eyes but anger in his voice. A booming shudder ran through the metal walls and floor. The guard flinched.
‘What is happening?’ asked Mersadie.
‘Someone is trying to kill us to get to you.’
Mersadie stared at a him.
‘I was a prisoner,’ she began.
‘People don’t kill ships to execute one prisoner,’ he growled, biting off the next words. ‘What have you done?’
‘I…’ she said, and then stopped, calm replacing confusion. She looked at him levelly. ‘It’s not what I did, it’s who I was, who I knew.’
‘Your name…’ he murmered, stepping back, looking at her with the light of realisation in his eyes. ‘Oliton. In the Great Crusade, before the war… I heard your name. Reports from the front. You… were a remembrancer.’
‘A remembrancer to the Sons of Horus,’ she said, simply. ‘To the armies of Horus.’
‘By the Throne’s grace…’ hissed the man, stepping back, eyes wide. Another rumble shook the hull. ‘They aren’t just trying to kill you. They are trying to kill us. They are trying to kill us because we have talked to you.’
The guard, who had been listening, raised his gun, finger fumbling at the trigger. The big man slammed the barrel down just before the guard fired. The guard struggled, but the big man pulled the gun out of his hand and shoved the guard back.
‘She is death,’ gasped the guard. ‘She has killed us all.’
‘I can help,’ said Mersadie, as the man turned back to her. ‘I think I can save you, save us. But I need to get away from here. I need to–’
‘Reach the Praetorian,’ said the man. ‘How do you even begin to have a reason for that?’
‘Because I need to tell him something that may save everything that he is fighting for.’
The man looked at her; the guard had hauled himself to his feet.
He does not have any reason to believe me, she thought, and then a phrase he had used rose in her mind, clear and bright. ‘Throne’s grace…’
‘How could–’
‘Because I am carrying a message from a saint,’ she said. ‘From a friend. From someone called Euphrati Keeler.’
The man looked at her, mouth half-open, not blinking.
‘And you can help?’ he said, and she could see the hope rising behind the fear. ‘You can protect us?’
‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But not if we die now.’
In the dry poetry of the void-born, this manner of disaster was called a fire cascade. One ship exploded, and the debris was catapulted out as shrapnel. The debris struck another ship in close proximity, which exploded in turn, and then its debris destroyed another, and another, the disaster leaping from one victim, to many, to countless multitudes in a few bounds. It was a rare event, the vast distances involved in void manoeuvres saw to that. But the ships navigating the approach channels around Uranus’ moon Oberon were very close to each other. So close that several catastrophes had already been avoided by the narrowest margins. When the first ship exploded, the fire cascade followed within moments.
Wreckage flew out on silent waves of flaming gas. Pieces of torn metal the size of tanks struck unshielded hulls and punched through. Fuel lines ruptured. Promethium met plasma and roared out, ripping and burning.
Hundreds died – gasping for breath as billows of fire stole the air from where they slept, or stood, or crouched in the arms of those they loved, seared to dust and ash in superheated infernos, tumbled into the vacuum. On and on the cascade ran, seeded from one explosion into another.
Thousands died – cut apart by shearing metal, shot through by grains of debris flung through hulls in hundred-metre-wide shot blasts.
Hundreds of thousands died – spinning over and over in the torn chunks of their ships.
Shock waves spun the Antius as it turned and tried to run to the edge of the spreading cloud of death. Its engines fired, cut out and then slammed it forwards as a piece of hull the size of a Titan blasted through the space it had just vacated.
Sound roared through the Antius’ bridge. Crew shouted, some asking for orders, others just screaming. The hull groaned. Alert gongs boomed in spaces beneath the deck plates. Lights blinked constellations of crimson and amber across every machine.
Vek caught the edge of the stairs to the helm platform as he hauled himself up. Mersadie was in front of him. Somehow, she was calm, almost serene, as though she had seen this face of existence before and looked on it with familiarity. Vek turned as they reached the top. Sub-mistress Koln saw Mersadie and lunged for a sidearm clamped to the side of the helm console.
‘No!’ snapped Vek, moving between Koln and Mersadie.
‘We should shoot her and dump her into the void,’ snarled Koln. Her eyes were bloodshot, the gun barrel shaking in her hand.
Mersadie had stopped, her eyes wide as they took in the strobing fire beyond the viewports.
‘She can help us live,’ said Vek. Another blossom of flame opened in the near void.
‘She caused this!’ roared Koln.
‘If there is a chance that she can help us survive then I am going to take it.’
‘They want her dead, so we give them what they want.’
‘They will kill us anyway,’ said Vek.
‘I am captain of this ship. I will not–’
‘My ship,’ said Vek, his voice suddenly low and dangerous. He saw Koln’s eyes flick to the guard’s gun, which he still had in his hands. ‘My ship,’ he said again. The pistol in her hand shook more. He could see the anger and fear moving beneath the skin of her face. He realised that the cacophony of the bridge had dimmed, that most of the crew were watching what was happening.
Koln lowered the gun.
‘Whatever you can do, do it now,’ he said to Mersadie.
She shook her head.
‘I can’t stop this,’ she said, still staring out of the viewport. We must run. Get us out of this and into the sunward gulf.’
‘You said you could help,’ snarled Vek.
‘You think they are going to stop?’ said Mersadie, looking at him, and something in her voice held him s
ilent. ‘If we can get away from this, they will come after us, after you. They just fired into a mass of civilian ships to try to kill us. They will hunt us down even in the middle of this war.’
‘That is insane.’
‘Not in the minds of the people who held me prisoner. To them, this is the battle and they have the will to see it through. To them, innocence proves nothing.’
‘Then we are dead,’ breathed Vek.
‘No,’ said Mersadie. ‘That is not certain.’
Vek looked at her and blinked, and an image rose from memory into his mind’s eye: an old boat of wood tossed on a high sea beneath a sky of black clouds and forked lightning. It had been an illustration in a book that he had read when he was small – a real book of paper that smelled of strange earthy scents, a doorway into alien realms for a boy born into the void habitats of Uranus. It had come from a distant world with his mother, and the pictures on its pages had shown him things that he still thought of as truer than the picts and holos he had seen of other places: forests of trees with orange leaves, the sun rising behind snow-capped mountains, and the boat on a sea in a storm…
He had come back to that picture of the boat again and again, staring at it, until at last he asked his mother what it meant.
She had smiled.
‘That is us,’ his mother had said. ‘Our lives and all we do are the boat, and the sea is the universe. Sometimes it is calm, and seems our friend, there to give us delight or comfort. And sometimes… sometimes it is a storm that can flip the boat of our lives over, break us and swallow us down. It means that sometimes we are small, and the tides we travel cannot be bargained with or bent to our will. Sometimes we can only hold on and hope that the storm is kind.’
‘What do you need?’ he asked Mersadie.
‘I need to send a signal,’ she said. ‘You said that you sent a signal about me before, on military channels?’
‘Yes,’ said Vek, frowning.
‘Send another signal now. Send it on the same channel you sent the last transmission.’
